"Or so they say," Sturm muttered, his gaze angry on the glistening shield. "For that night he walked into the blinding snow, and none who survived that time ever saw him again."
The common room of the inn fell into respectful silence. Otik paused in sweeping the hearth and leaned against his broom, and the young girl he had hired to spread fresh rushes on the floor ceased her midnight labor and crouched by the bar, knowing somehow that this pained, intimate talk demanded her stillness.
"Did I tell you that Lord Angriff went to his fate laughing?" Sturm asked with an odd smile. "That as easily as if he were disrobing for the night, he handed his shield and breastplate to his good friend Lord Boniface?"
Sturm closed his eyes. His voice cracked as he continued the story.
" 'They are no use to me where I go,' he said, 'these instruments of Knighthood. And why are you troubled?' he asked them. 'Why do dark thoughts arise in your hearts?' It was all they could do to keep from weeping, Mother said, for they knew that he went to his death and that they would never see the likes of him again.
"So he embraced his companions that afternoon and passed from their midst, soon lost in the swirling countryside beyond the walls of Castle Brightblade. Two men followed him into the blinding snow. They disobeyed my father's commands because of the love they bore him, and for a moment, the weeping men of the garrison saw my father and the two who followed him as a triad of dark spots in the depth of the blizzard, and then again at the very edge of sight, where the snow-shrouded torches of the peasants looked like low and distant stars, and the three of them seemed to enter the thin, dark ranks of the enemy, never falling, but as though they walked blindly into an impenetrable thicket."
Sturm shivered. "It is out of that thicket that the son of Angriff Brightblade has emerged, my friends. I shall find Lord Angriff Brightblade, or what has become of him, though the Jaws of Hiddukel stand in the way, full intending to undo me."
"Which they well may do, lad," Raistlin said quietly. "Which they well may do."
Sturm swallowed nervously. "Whether they do or no, 'tis time I should test them. Would that I had your wits in my service, Raistlin Majere. Or Caramon's strength. The High Clerist's Tower is a fierce place for a backwoods boy."
"You are no weakling, Sturm!" Caramon encouraged loudly, startling the little girl by the bar, who scurried into the shadows, trailing rushes. "You can ride, too, and use a sword far better than I can. It's just that… just…"
"I'm no swordsman," Sturm asserted. "Not really. Not like my father was, nor like they're accustomed to seeing in the north. Nor half as brave, nor nearly the horseman. Ask my mother. Ask our Solamnic friends, who travel south just to tell me these things."
Caramon opened his mouth as if to answer, then leaned back in his chair disgustedly. Words once again had mastered him. Somewhere below them, on the road that wound through the vallenwoods of Solace, the whicker of a horse rose out of the whistling night wind, and the harsh shout of a rider followed it.
"What we both are trying to say," Raistlin urged, turning away from his thoughts and regarding Sturm with a bright, unsettling stare, "is that if you hear such things in Solace, you'll hear worse in the Vingaards. This is too early, Sturm. The North is ravenous, and the Order… well, the Order is as you have told us."
"It must be now, Raistlin," Sturm argued, lifting the cup to his lips, tasting the tepid, smoky brew. "It must be now because, above the Code and Measure and my mother's last stories, I can stand it no longer."
"What's that?" Caramon asked, his mind already elsewhere. But the story continued in his thoughts: the incomparable Angriff Brightblade, master swordsman and hero and noble Knight, who had the nerve to vanish magnificently at the siege of Castle Brightblade.
Who had the nerve to leave behind a son and too many questions.
"I have to know," Sturm announced dramatically. "I have to find my father. Yes, yes, he may be dead. But up there, he's a memory instead of… well, instead of a legend."
Raistlin sighed. With a strange, broken smile, he turned back to the fire.
"Everything my father has done," Sturm explained, "in the lists, in the Nerakan Wars, in keeping castle and family-"
"Tramples on your young days," Raistlin interrupted. He coughed, no doubt a winter cold, and swirled the lukewarm tea in his cup. "This hunt for fathers," he observed ironically, "is a haunted thing. You have to put a face on the one who is killing you."
Caramon nodded slowly, though he did not really understand. His gaze followed that of his brother. The twins sat in silence, staring at the red embers.
Yes, it is haunted, Sturm thought angrily, looking at the two of them, content in their strangely balanced fellowship. But you will never understand. Neither of you. For no matter what befalls, you have each other to… to…
To show you who you are.
And no one is killing me.
Baffled in the thicket of his own thoughts, Sturm rose from the table. The twins scarcely noticed his departure as he walked into the bracing Abanasinian night. Caramon waved softly over his shoulder, and the last Sturm saw of his friends, they were sitting side by side, framed by firelight and yoked by shadows, each lost in his opposite dreams.
Chapter 4
Now, with the journey north and a season in Solamnia behind him, all Sturm had kept of that moment was its expectation and gloom.
As midwinter stormed toward the first blustery week of February, and windswept snow dusted the dark inclines of the Vingaard Mountains, Sturm spent the time in training, schooled by Gunthar in riding and swordsmanship, by Lord Adamant in the lessons of forest survival, and by all most Solamnically in vigil and prayers and deep dread. In the evening, after his instruction, he paced the battlements of the Knight's Spur, squinting southward where the Wings of Habbakuk sloped down to the Virkhus Hills, then even farther down onto the Solamnic Plains. When the weather was clear and windless, the lad imagined he saw a ridge of green at the southernmost edge of sight. The Southern Darkwoods, he thought, and his shoulder ached. And Vertumnus. Late winter, and I am far from ready.
What he had in place of Raistlin's cryptic comments were questions more immediate. He asked them of himself nightly, setting his lantern on the crenellated wall.
"Why did the Green Man come to the Tower? And why was this Yule different from any other? Why was I chosen, and what does he want of me? What awaits me in the Southern Darkwoods?
And regardless of sword and horse and instruction, how can I prepare for a man of shadows and magic?
Lord Stephan Peres would watch from his offices with rising concern. Out his window, he could see the solitary wavering lantern in the morning darkness. He had watched Sturm train and prepare for departure, and though the lad was a quick study, he had started green and clumsy and would end not too far from where he started.
It was a clumsiness that might prove to be Sturm's undoing, the old Knight thought darkly.
There was the matter of the peasantry, for one thing. The common folk of the Solamnic countryside had never forgiven the Knights for their supposed role in the Cataclysm-the disastrous rending of the world by quake and fire over three centuries ago. Grudges endured among the peasants, and though hostility and rebellion would submerge for a long while-perhaps ten, twelve years on occasion-trouble would resurface sporadically, as it had in the uprising five years back.